surveillance

NYTIMES
Tracking entire populations to combat the pandemic now could open the doors to more invasive forms of government snooping later.
In South Korea, government agencies are harnessing surveillance-camera footage, smartphone location data and credit card purchase records to help trace the recent movements of coronavirus patients and establish virus transmission chains.
In Lombardy, Italy, the authorities are analyzing location data transmitted by citizens’ mobile phones to determine ...

By simply turning off Facebook activity, you can take some of your privacy back.
WFMY NEWS 2
What we do on the internet is far from anonymous. Many of the sites we visit and apps we use share our information.
Ring cameras made headlines recently after hackers were able to access some of the devices and even talk through them. A new report is questioning the company's use of its customers' data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation looked at Ring's app for Android devices and found it sh...

It wants all existing images deleted, too.
THE VERGE
YouTube has sent a cease and desist letter to Clearview AI demanding that the controversial facial recognition startup stop scraping YouTube videos to gather faces for its database and delete any images it’s already collected. The demand, first reported by CBS News, says that YouTube forbids anyone from collecting data from its platform that can be used to identify people and that Clearview has admitted to violating this policy.
“YouTube’s ...

Google has said it will let its human reviewers listen to audio recordings made by its virtual assistant only if users give it fresh permission to do so.
BBC NEWS
The company said the option had always been opt-in but it had not been explicit enough that people were involved in transcribing the clips.
The pledge follows Apple's switch to an opt-in model in August.
Amazon and Facebook, by contrast, make users ask if they want to be excluded.
Google's move has been welcomed by digital...

I knew something seemed strange about all those fake bot friend requests from asia on my linkedin page which is why I closed it months ago.
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
One of America's most recent espionage cases started with a friendly hello over the Internet.
It ended with a jury in Virginia finding former CIA officer Kevin Mallory guilty of spying for China. The Mallory case — a rare counterintelligence investigation to go to trial — provides a lesson in how Chinese spies use social media to...

DAILY MAIL
According to researchers the technology has broad surveillance applications.
Chinese researchers have developed a new camera technology that can render human sized-subjects as far as 28 miles away.
According to a paper from researcher Zheng-Ping Li published in the open source journal ArXiv, the camera technology can cut through smog and other pollution using a mixture of laser imaging and advanced AI software.
While LIDAR technology, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging...

China tried to electronically jam U.S. drone flights over the South China Sea in a bid to thwart spying on disputed island military construction, U.S. officials said.
Global Hawk long-range surveillance drones were targeted by the jamming in at least one incident near the disputed Spratly Islands, where China is building military facilities on Fiery Cross Reef.
Disclosure of the jamming came as a U.S. Navy P-8 surveillance flight on Wednesday was challenged eight times by the Chinese milit...

Two Chinese professors are among six Chinese nationals accused by federal prosecutors of economic espionage sponsored by their home government in the alleged theft of sensitive radio frequency filter technology developed by two U.S. companies.
The professors, who attended the University of Southern California, allegedly obtained the trade secret information-- designed in part to limit interference in mobile phone reception and other devices-- as part of a "long-running effort'' to benefit uni...

Police in China have arrested four people and detained or warned another 81 as authorities crack down on alleged Internet rumour-mongering, state media reported Saturday.
Police did not give details on the timing of the actions, Xinhua news agency said, adding that 16 websites were punished for "weak safety management".
Citing police, Xinhua said that the alleged rumour-mongers "used social network services to fabricate and spread rumours, or forward rumours published on foreign websites"....

As of this January, U.S. Global Hawk drones have been spotted regularly over the Black Sea, Gen Andrei Kartapolov, Chief of the Main Department for Operations at the Russian General Staff said on Thursday at the 4th Moscow conference on international security.
"And in March 2015, the drones appeared for the first time in the airspace over Ukraine," he said, adding that the utilization of these unmanned aircraft increased the depth of data gathering on the territory of Russia by 250 kilometers...